CINCINNATI — The City of Cincinnati is now receiving enough solar energy to power more than 400 municipal buildings, including City Hall, police stations and health clinics, and has already saved more than $1 million in electricity costs since last year.
But the New Market Solar project, built on more than 1,000 acres in Highland County, is generating controversy at the state and local levels. Many residents are upset at the loss of valuable farmland, and they don’t like living near solar facilities that are shielded by prison-like fences and scraggly vegetation.
“It actually reminds me of 'The Hunger Games' in that we’re kind of like the sector that’s producing the energy for Cincinnati,” said Becky Williams, who has fought solar expansion in Highland County for years.
Many of them are very close to Williams’ home, which is located between Lynchburg and New Vienna, in a community that now has long lines of solar panels interspersed with corn and soybean fields.
“They’ve snuck in under the cloak of darkness before anybody realized what was going on,” Williams said. “We’re just feeding them (Cincinnati). It’s out of their sight, it’s out of their mind. They can just flip a switch and they’ve got electric.”
Drawn here by flat farmland and abundant sunshine, some solar developers are willing to pay more than $1,000 an acre, per year, to farmers who own land along the valuable PJM Interconnection transmission network. That’s three times more than farmers can earn growing crops.
“We believe it’s wrong to rip up this planet and to leave it worse off for our kids,” then Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley said at a November 2019 press conference announcing the 20-year purchase power agreement with New Market Solar. The deal locked in the electric price for two decades.
At the time, it was the largest municipal solar array in the nation.
City leaders estimated it would save the city $1.7 million over 20 years, in a best-case scenario. But the reality of the savings has been much higher.
“I would say that the cost of energy has accelerated faster than we expected,” said Ollie Kroner, the city’s director of environment and sustainability. “We expect those savings to increase.”
After a three-year delay due to supply chain issues, the city finally began receiving a portion of its solar energy, 20 megawatts, last May. The final 15 megawatts became operational just last week, Kroner said.
“This is enough on a sunny day to take care of all of our energy needs,” Kroner said. “We are generating savings in real-time, at this very moment, as the sun shines. Those dollars flow into the general fund of city government. We are actively strategizing on how to use those savings to make additional projects, additional savings happen.”
Most of the project is expected to be finished by December. The remaining 65 megawatts will flow into the Cincinnati Energy Aggregation Program and into city homes.
“We all have our own opinions, but the world is in a much-needed shift right now … to a cleaner energy grid,” Kroner said. “This is an important piece of that transition. I think we’re getting better at it, finding new locations to install solar, ways to blend solar with agriculture.”
State lawmaker Shane Wilkin, who represents Clinton and Highland counties first as a representative and now as a senator, wrote a letter to the Ohio Power Siting Board last May asking to stop large-scale solar projects until they visually looked better.
He cited four projects, Hillcrest Solar, New Market Solar, Hecate Energy Highland Solar, and Willowbrook Solar as violating the integrity of the landscape in his district.
“These developers are not concerned with being good neighbors and frankly, what is being constructed proves just that,” Wilkin wrote. “I have had many visitors down to see the projects and not a single one agrees that this is what the industry should be doing.”
“No substantial setbacks, six-foot chain link fence with three strands of barbed wire and … next to nothing for vegetative screening. This makes these projects unacceptable,” Wilkin wrote.
Four months later, power siting board staff inspected New Market Solar. As a condition of operation, the state had required their equipment to be set back 100 feet from property lines, public road center lines and all homes, businesses, and public areas.
“Thirty-eight of the 39 setbacks measured by staff … were not in compliance with the certificate. The range of setbacks found to be in violation of the required 100-foot setback distance was between 71 feet 2 inches and 97 feet 2 inches,” according to an Oct. 18, 2022 compliance report.
After the power siting board found New Market Solar out of compliance, it set an Oct. 10 hearing before an administrative law judge to rule on how the issue will be resolved.
This is the first time compliance staff have ordered a court hearing on a solar project issue, said Matt Butler, a spokesperson for the power siting board.
A spokesperson for New Market’s owner, Canada-based Liberty Power-Algonquin Power & Utilities Corp., declined to comment.
“Setbacks it makes it a little more aesthetically pleasing,” said Aubrey Bolender, vice chair of the Brown County Soil and Water Conservation District Board, who has heard complaints about the Amazon Solar Farm Ohio – Hillcrest, which sits on more than 2,000 acres near Mt. Orab.
“They promised to put up trees, pine trees and shrubbery that would kind of mitigate the bad aesthetics essentially, well they’re not doing that either,” Bolender said.
A spokesperson for Hillcrest’s owner, Canada-based Innergex Renewable Energy, said the project was built according to the state-issued permit, but more vegetative covering was added in response to community feedback.
“As the vegetation grows, we are confident that the fencing will be less visible,” said Innergex spokesperson Guillaume Perron-Piche.
Based on community feedback from Hillcrest, Innergex decided to use a new type of fencing for its next project, Palomino Solar Energy which will be built just east of Lynchburg in Highland County.
“Innergex listened to the concerns of community and … committed to a perimeter fence that is both small-wildlife permeable and aesthetically fitting for a rural location. Fencing around panels will incorporate gaps or spaces of at least six inches by six inches to allow passage of small mammals,” Guillaume Perron-Piche said. “However, due to the high voltage and to ensure safety of the community, we are required under the electrical code to have certain heights of fencing with barbed wire at specific locations within the project.”
That Palomino project will be constructed across the street from Williams’ home on what is now a cornfield.
“We’ve become industrial. We have prime farmland here and that’s what they’re after,” Williams said. “Now its industrial solar and I’m afraid one day it’s going to be industrial waste.”
Williams has been part of a citizen group fighting the expansion of solar in Highland County for several years and has picketed before county commissioner meetings.
Commissioners in many surrounding counties, including Clermont and Brown, have banned future large-scale solar projects in parts or all of their counties. But there is no ban in Highland County, and commissioners have approved every qualified energy program application brought before them.
The money and jobs these solar projects are bringing to a county with a high poverty rate is very welcome to some residents.
“We have a chance to generate a 2,000 percent tax increase on the land in this project, without raising our own taxes,” said Doug Carraher, who spoke at a public meeting in March 2019 in favor of the Hecate Energy Highland Solar project on 2,800 acres near Sardinia.
“This is not an easy decision, but it's a benefit not only to our family but to the region … the county has a poverty rate of 19.8 percent, with 28.4 percent of all children living in poverty,” Carraher said, according to a meeting transcript filed with the state power siting board.
“There's a terrible lack of opportunity in Highland County,” said Becky Geiger, who spoke about how their schools are far worse than urban schools.
“We have kids that show up hungry, that don't have breakfast in the morning. Very economically depressed area. This could do a lot for our community, and I hope you approve it,” Geiger said, according to a meeting transcript.
But others at that 2019 meeting worried about drainage and flooding, if solar panels were environmentally safe, and the sadness of having to look at solar panels each day instead of seeing cows and corn and beans.
The Ohio Power Siting Board approved the Highland Solar project in 2019, but construction has been delayed. In a July 2022 letter to the board, an attorney for the project wrote that it was only 12 percent complete due to delays in the shipment of solar modules and hoped to finish in 2023.
No one from Hecate Energy responded to a request for comment.
The Highland project adjoins parts of the New Market project, where the city of Cincinnati is buying its electricity, and is one of eight large-scale solar projects in the area.
“We didn’t choose to live in an industrial area,” Williams said. “We have enough … We’ve done our part. We’ve done our share. We need to be done.”
For his part, Kroner is looking for suitable sites to add solar projects within Cincinnati’s city limits, including brownfield sites, but it’s challenging because it doesn’t have the open space of rural areas.
“I apologize to anybody who doesn’t find them attractive. I find them magnificent myself, I love driving through solar farms or wind farms and understanding that it’s a key part of our evolution right now,” Kroner said.
Margaret Clutter, who also spoke at the 2019 meeting with her husband, Jay, about the Highland project, said if their deal to sell land to Hecate went through, they would move to a warmer climate for health reasons. But she wanted to make sure her land would still look attractive to her neighbors, even with solar panels.
“We made an agreement with Hecate, and the first question that I asked is, "What is the solar going to look like to our neighbors, because our neighbors are important to us,” Margaret Clutter said, according to the meeting transcript.
“Hecate's answer to me … they told us it would be set back from the road, it will be fenced, there will be trees, there will be grass, there will be wildflowers, and that made me happy,” she said, according to the transcript.
Highland County auditor records show Margaret and Jay Clutter sold 915 acres to Desri Highland Land Holdings LLC on Dec. 2, 2021, for $12.75 million.
Construction started on the solar project a month later.
